Missions' goodwill spans generations

I don't normally use this space to brag about kinfolk, but I beg your indulgence today to tell you today about my nephew, his wife and four children, currently on furlough in Maine from their missionary post halfway across the globe in Indonesia.

Brian Underhill, the dad, is a pilot-mechanic in Tarakan, on the island of Borneo, for the Mission Aviation Fellowship. With his wife Holly, two sons and two daughters, the youngest 4, Brian and his Christian missionary family have spent the last three-and-a-half years getting to know the people there and helping them out with mercy flights to remote jungle villages reachable only by air.

Back home until January, they are devoting much of their time to describing their work abroad to supporting churches in this country. I was privileged to attend one such presentation recently to a small but enthusiastic congregation in the coastal farm town where Brian grew up.

He told one story about a little-known event that occurred near the end of World War 2 in a region of Borneo over which he flies daily today. An American B-24 plane on a mission to bomb Japanese ships crashed in the jungle there in November, 1944. Parachuting into the bush and scattered for miles, members of the crew were intercepted by Dayak natives who had come to be known as "the wild men of Borneo." These tribesmen had practiced headhunting for centuries until it was eventually banned by British colonialists.

When the surviving American airmen were accosted, Brian told his audience, the natives were struck by the initials stamped on their holsters — USA. "Oosa!" they cried, "Oosa!." They had immediately made a connection with the missionaries from the United States who had converted great numbers of them to Christianity in the 1920s and '30s. Conversely, most had experienced firsthand the brutality of their Japanese captors earlier in the Pacific War.

The natives put the Americans up in their own houses, fed them and tended to their injuries as best they could. They went a step further too, under the direction of an Australian anthropologist who had studied the region earlier and was now assigned by the British to set up a native-Bornean guerrilla army to join in the fight to liberate them. Apparently without British authorization, he permitted the "wild men" to resume their ages-old practice of headhunting. Before they were done, some 1,000 of the enemy troops were executed by poisoned blowpipe darts, with many of their heads smoked, dried and hung on poles.

I hasten to add that my missionary nephew did not share the gory details of that episode with his church audience. Nor had I ever heard about it personally, even though I served with the Navy in the South Pacific only a few months later. I learned of the details only by watching a PBS documentary on You Tube called "Secrets of the Dead: The Airmen and the Headhunters," based on a book by the same title by Judith Heimann.

Brian recounted the war story as part of his presentation to help explain how missionaries, through acts of mercy and goodwill, can make a significant impact on those they serve that may be remembered for generations by those they've helped.